Earnings Call Transcript - VEON Q4 2020

Operator, Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen and welcome to VEON Full Year 2020 and Fourth Quarter 2020 Results Webcast and Conference Call. As a reminder, today’s conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Nik Kershaw, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Nik Kershaw, Head of Investor Relations

Good day, everyone. Welcome to VEON’s fourth quarter and year-end results presentation. Nik Kershaw here, Group Head of Investor Relations. I am pleased to be joined on the line today by Kaan and Sergi, our Group Co-CEOs, along with our group CFO, Serkan Okandan. Alexander Torbakhov, our CEO for Beeline Russia, will join us for the Q&A session at the end. Today’s presentation will begin with an overview and some highlights of the past year from Kaan. Following this, we will do a detailed review on Russia by both Kaan and Sergi. Sergi will then discuss some of our other larger markets with Serkan giving a review of our fourth quarter financial results. We will then hand it back to Sergi to discuss our outlook and priorities for 2021. As ever, we will ensure that there is ample time for your questions, but we would ask you to save these for the end of the presentation. Before getting started, I would like to remind you that we may make forward-looking statements during the presentation, which involve certain risks and uncertainties. These statements relate in part to the company’s anticipated performance and guidance for 2021, future market developments and trends, operational network development and network investment, and the company’s ability to realize its targets and commercial and strategic initiatives, including current and future transactions. Certain factors may cause actual results to differ materially from those in our forward-looking statements, including the risks detailed in the company’s Annual Report on Form 20-F and other recent public filings made by the company with the SEC. The earnings release and the presentation, each of which include reconciliation of non-IFRS measures can be downloaded from our website. With that, let me hand over to Kaan.

Kaan Terzioglu, Co-CEO

Thank you, Nik. Hello to everyone and thank you for joining us. This year was marked by COVID-19 and the changes that it imposed on our lives. But since the very beginning, we took a proactive approach so that the year was not about what COVID did to our business, but more about what we did as a business in the existence of the new reality. Throughout the year, we kept on executing in delegating more authority to operating country teams, hiring top talent to drive our strategy forward, protecting our employees in all countries where we operate, accelerating the momentum with 4G deployments, improving the quality of service to our customers, achieving stronger operational foundations, which will carry the VEON Group further. I will elaborate further on all these points as we go through the presentation. Today, I am pleased to tell you that in quarter four, VEON Group is back to year-on-year growth, with a 1.4% total revenue increase and a 0.8% EBITDA growth in local currency. On a full year, CapEx investment of $1.9 billion was a significant contributor to the improvement of network quality and capacity across all our markets. Driving the growth of our 4G base, a key foundation for today’s and future growth potential. Next slide. I want to recap some of the most significant achievements in 2020. Firstly, we enhanced our governance, implementing a lean headquarters, with local Boards of Directors at each one of our operating companies. This new governance allows for greater efficiency and speed in reacting to market conditions. We have made continuous improvements to our capital structure, which I will leave later on for Serkan to update you further. Secondly, we have reached 80 million 4G subscribers and we are now serving 38% of our base with 4G. This indicates a full 10 percentage point rise in our 4G subscriber penetration, which was made possible due to record network rollouts, improvements in network quality, and other steps taken in customer experience. Third, we are executing well on our Russia turnaround. We will dive deeper into this key group priority, but for the moment, let me just mention that our Russian operations recorded positive year-on-year growth, both in December and now in January 2021. The fourth achievement I want to highlight is the growth in our digital verticals across the group. Sergi Herrero will expand on this exciting area, which is central to our longer-term growth strategy. Next slide. In this slide, you will see the improving trend in our group revenues as the year progressed on a monthly basis. The 1.4% year-on-year growth in Q4 and more specifically, the 5% increase in the month of December were achieved despite the significant drop in roaming revenue. Improving financial performance of our Russia business, which registered year-over-year growth in December, contributed to these group results. Mobile data revenues remain a key driver of revenue growth for the group. And in Q4, we registered a 14.4% year-on-year growth in mobile data revenue. Another growth engine is fixed services, where we saw an increase in demand, usage, and subscriber base, which led to 31% year-on-year growth in Kazakhstan, 21% in Ukraine, and 10% in Russia. On the next slide, let me elaborate on 4G growth, the cornerstone of our strategy. We have added 20 million 4G subscribers over the last 12 months, reaching a total of 80 million 4G users. This means an important shift in the structure of our customer base as we now serve 38% of our customers with 4G connectivity, an improvement of 10 percentage points from a year ago. Why does this transformation of the customer base matter? You will see some of the reasons already on this slide on the bottom left. Our 4G subscribers consume 2x to 4x more data, churn less, and have significantly higher ARPU. Over the next few years, our target is to drive 4G penetration in our customer base up to 75% and this will support not only the growth of our connectivity business but also enable our digital product and prospects.

Sergi Herrero, Co-CEO

Thanks, Kaan and hi, everyone on the line. Let me start with a few words about our group digital strategy before updating you on the progress we made in Russia and other markets. We see huge potential to deploy digital services across all of our markets, and we are going about this in one of two ways, depending on our local competitive advantage and the digital maturity of the market. In countries like Russia and Kazakhstan, we decided to go deep in specific verticals like fin-tech and ad-tech, where we can establish a strong competitive advantage by leveraging our big data and AI capabilities. For countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh, we believe we can go one step further and establish a dominant ecosystem that provides a range of digital services built around our market leadership in fin-tech with JazzCash and entertainment with Toffee.

Serkan Okandan, CFO

Thanks, Sergi and hello to all participants. In the coming slides, I will now elaborate on our financial results in more detail. Moving to Slide 25, after several challenging quarters, I am pleased to report that VEON Group returned to growth in the last quarter of the year, with almost all of our markets showing improved year-on-year trends compared with Q3. As Slide 25 sets out, revenues grew by 1.4% year-on-year during Q4 in local currency terms, led by steady improvement in Russia and double-digit growth in both Ukraine and Kazakhstan. On a reported basis, this corresponds to minus 11.3%, once currency movements of $269 million are accounted for. Group EBITDA followed revenues, rising by 0.8% in local currency terms or minus 11.6% on a reported basis. Once again, we continue to prioritize 4G network investments across our footprint. This was reflected in year-on-year rise in Group CapEx, up by 16.5%, with CapEx intensity at 23.7% for the full year. Our EBITDA margin for the full year was kept flat at 41.4% and net profit for the quarter was reported at $35 million, mainly due to adverse currency effects

Ondrej Cabejsek, Analyst

Hi, thank you and congratulations on the progress that you’re making. I have a couple of questions for the outlook mainly. First one in terms of CapEx, you are now giving us a lot of KPIs for Russia, especially, but you’re also guiding for roughly similar CapEx intensity for 2021. Can you speak a bit about how much of that is still going towards improvements in Russia and how much of that will be kind of reallocated to other markets or segments? Second question on your priorities for next year, you’re talking about potential streamlining of the portfolio. I know this is, I guess, down to various factors, but how are you today thinking about Algeria? I mean, if there is a good price, is that something that you can now say that you will be looking to sell? And finally, on the towers, if I may. I mean, beyond a history of trying to do JVs or sell towers in Pakistan, is there a way that you’re thinking about potentially monetizing towers? Are JVs your primary concern or are you still looking at selling parts of the portfolio in some of these markets?

Kaan Terzioglu, Co-CEO

Sure. So Ondrej, thanks a lot for the question. On the CapEx side, our CapEx investments are focused on three important dimensions: capacity, coverage, and quality. We have reached now with the addition of 20 million additional 4G customers, a 38% penetration of our subscriber base in LTE. We have to increase this penetration rate up to 70% or 75%. That will practically mean that you're going to be seeing a similar amount of investments as we have this year in 2021 to continue. Approximately half of this investment naturally goes to Russia, where half of our business is taking place. But as I mentioned to you, the 4G penetration rate in Russia is slightly higher towards more closer to the 50% range. Now with regard to the towers, the towers business, as we move from 4G to 5G type of platforms and higher densification as countries also prioritize rural area access, is becoming an area where we are going to see more scalability requirements, more standardization requirements, which ultimately requires independent tower operators. What we will be doing this year to make sure that we crystallize the value of our tower assets so that we have closable options for the future. These options could be mergers of our operations to create these scalable and standardized independent tower operation capabilities. Some of that could be monetization of these assets. Some of them will be focused and much more efficient operations of these entities and having shares of bigger JVs rather than our own tower infrastructure.

Serkan Okandan, CFO

Thank you for the question. Let me answer first the portfolio question, and then I’ll pass it to Kaan for the CapEx on the towers space. As you know, we are constantly reviewing our portfolio. We do that on a six-monthly basis. We sold Armenia because we felt it was an operation where we were not positioned to extract the maximum value. Our view is to focus on the markets where we can make a shift and increase our value for shareholders and move on in others that perhaps are not important for us.

Kaan Terzioglu, Co-CEO

Thank you, Alexander.

Alexander Torbakhov, CEO of Beeline Russia

Actually, you have said the main thing already. So we, unfortunately, Beeline underinvested in previous years into its network and lost the positive attitude from many clients. And that resulted in the loss of client base in 2019. The work we performed in 2020, we actually reached the lowest point of our performance in May. And that was accumulated with quality problems. But since then, we are growing steadily our client base and our revenue top line. And definitely, as Kaan mentioned already, we will continue to do this year and next year because we have to invest more into the quality of our network. But in addition to that, I want to say that it’s not only about CapEx; actually, we made a lot of optimization exercises. And I can say that, for example, in Moscow, our network is one of the best in the city. And our clients start to feel that already.

Henrik Herbst, Analyst

Yes, hello. I’ve got two questions, please. I was just wondering, firstly, in terms of your guidance, you’re saying low to mid-single digits in local currency. I guess you exited 2020 as you were saying about 5% growth, if I got the chart right in local currency? And I guess Russia is just about sort of timing – your comps are getting quite a lot easier throughout the year. So I was just wondering the sort of low single digits. Well, what are you sort of, in particular, thinking about as the main risks that could make you end up at the sort of low end of that guidance?

Kaan Terzioglu, Co-CEO

Henrik, thank you very much. Let me give a flavor of the – where we stand in terms of the business outlook that we see. And then I will leave the word to Serkan to answer in further detail about the dividend question. I think you will not criticize us for being a little bit prudent on the outlook as we just see the vaccination efforts throughout our operations. And we would like to keep an eye on that. And probably, we will give you the right and exact answer by the end of Q1 in terms of what those expectations will be. But from this perspective, I would like to keep our presence in terms of where we head in the momentum of the business.